1. Field of the Invention
The present invention provides methods for tagging and tracing materials using nucleic acids as taggants. The process of tagging involves altering a substance in a manner that allows for the subsequent identification of the substance by detecting the alteration. The alteration disclosed herein involves nucleic acids.
Society currently attempts to track the manufacture and distribution of a large number of diverse substances, including (1) natural resources such as animals, plants, oil, minerals, and water; (2) chemicals such as drugs, solvents, petroleum products, and explosives; (3) commercial by-products including pollutants such as radioactive or other hazardous waste; and (4) articles of manufacture such as guns, typewriters, automobiles and automobile parts. Tagging aids in the determination of product identity and so provides information useful to manufacturers and consumers.
Some of the diverse uses of tagging methods and reagents include the identification of the manufacturer of an explosive, even after detonation, and the determination of flow patterns, so as to measure the spread of pollutants. The present invention provides a significant advance in the field, because the taggants can encode substantial amounts of information to aid subsequent identification. Moreover, by using recently available amplification technology, one can detect far less taggant than ever before. In fact, the present tagging methods work with such vanishingly small levels of taggant that drugs tagged by the present method can still pass the FDA standards (10 pg/dose) for amount of DNA, in this case, taggant DNA, in any product.
2. Information Disclosure
The use of tagging substances with polypeptides is known. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,359,353 and 4,441,943. As with the nucleic acid taggants of the subject invention, the polypeptide taggants use the order of amino acids in the polypeptide to encode information.